Posts Tagged ‘magicians’

The girlfriend just finished James Randi’s The Faith Healers, which I read earlier. We had a long and emotional conversation about Randi’s statement that those who believe in faith healers don’t question the reality of what they’re seeing. Especially in light of the fact that Randi was a professional magician.

She argued that Randi was being hypocritical, criticizing those who follow and fund faith healers for being gullible and absolutely blasting the healers for being liars and cheats, while depending on a similar suspension of disbelief to earn his living. She also noted that faith healers provide a service to their devotees, with the placebo response to their “healings” making folks feel better.

I don’t agree on the first point. The difference between a magician and a faith healer is something I’ve heard a lot of magicians say: Magicians are honest about their dishonesty. As an adult, you know going in that they are performing are tricks or illusions. That they have no skills that others can’t develop. That they are not tapping into some power outside of themselves. Some of them even dare you to figure out how they’ve created the illusion. Faith healers do none of these things. They may be using magicians’ tricks, but they claim that God is working through them and really, truly causing something unusual to happen.

Magicians work on two levels. Viewers who suspend disbelief can see the seemingly impossible happen. Those who view it all as trickery can marvel at the skill with which the magician makes it seem like the impossible is happening. Faith healers have only the first level. The healing works if and only if you believe the impossible really is happening.

Even more important, magic is entertainment. You don’t base life decisions on what magicians tell you. You pay your money to have fun for an hour or so. At worst, you go home and spend hours trying to reproduce something you saw. Faith healing is not entertainment. At its best, it’s a comforting ritual and a connection with others who have similar beliefs. At its worst, it can inspire a dependence on the healer and other sources of spiritual authority, undermining the devotees’ confidence in themselves and their control over their lives.

It’s harder to argue about the placebo response. Many doctors have ethical qualms about handing out pills that do nothing for a patient (although that doesn’t stop some of them for giving out antibiotics to treat viral infections). If it makes a person feel better, what’s the harm, right? Hell, who I am to argue about this stuff? I used to get regular acupuncture treatment and massages. They did nothing for my underlying condition, but they did make me feel better.

But is that really a service to the person being treated? They feel better, but they also might forgo a doctor’s care (like I did) in favor of the placebo results.

Is it better to tell yourself a lie (not necessarily a big one) or to accept the reality of the situation and work with that?

I’m not sure where I stand on this issue yet. I’m evolving.

In Randi’s world, lying to oneself and others about the nature of reality is never acceptable and he has no tolerance for those who do lie, especially when they can cause others harm. None. This makes him and his ideas tough to deal with. It’s a tough and scary world, in a lot of ways. Scares the heck out of me a lot of the time.

But it’s still empowering. It gives you the ability to make changes for yourself, to protect yourself, to make yourself who you want to be, without help from external forces (other than a little help from your human friends).

Discovered this in a backwards sort of way and it made me laugh pretty hard. It’s part of a series. Don’t be surprised if a few more episodes appear here. (And in case it isn’t clear, the grey-haired guy is God and the woman is Lucifer.)

In Voodoo Science, Robert Park makes an interesting point about science reports on TV:

If a stage magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, those in the audience may not know where the rabbit came from, but unless they’re hopelessly naive they know it isn’t magic. It’s a trick. And not a terribly difficult trick either, according to professional magicians. But how much easier it is to fool an audience with a complicated scientific apparatus. The television audience must accept on faith that the experiment is what the scientist says it is. It is as if, instead of pulling the rabbit out of the hat, the magician simply looks into the hat and assures the audience that the rabbit is there. [page 116]

Most viewers don’t have the background knowledge needed to sort fact from exaggeration (or outright impossibilities) in science reporting. They don’t even realize they should be looking in the hat for the rabbit.

What we should be doing is mentally strip-searching the magician and tearing apart the stage to find the rabbit.

With science on TV, sometimes there is a rabbit, sometimes it just looks like a rabbit, and sometimes there’s no rabbit at all.